...in homes of the railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the hotshot freight trains...
-Jack Kerouac, "October in the Railroad Earth"

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Sex on the trains: anecdotes from Henry Kisor's "Zephyr"

At the conclusion of Alfred Hitchcock's
1959 film, North by Northwest,
Americans were shown the romance of making love on a train.
(Immediately after the scene pictured above, where Cary Grant hoists
Eva Marie Saint onto the upper berth of a Pullman compartment,
Hitchcock cuts to the train going through a tunnel, just to make sure
the audience knew what would happen next.) In earlier days before
private compartments were common, the lore of the Nights Behind the
Green Curtains” enticed many young couples to book a Pullman section,
where only the heavy curtains separated them from other passengers
traversing the train. The Pullman honeymoon was a grand American
tradition.

There are still honeymooners who ride
the sleeping cars. (The Pullman Company got out of the sleeping car
business in the late Sixties, though older passengers sometimes refer
to “Pullmans.”) Of course, it's not just honeymooners and
other married couples who make love on the train. And not just in the
sleeping cars.

Sex on the train has surely been
happening ever since there were trains going any distance. A friend,
now in her eighties, recalled seeing a couple have sex in the coaches
(under blankets) in the 1940s. I've been reading Zephyr: Tracking
a Dream Across America by Henry
Kisor (New York: Times Books, 1994), and he has a section about sex
on the trains. Here are a a few choice passages:

“Each Superliner
sleeper compartment fronts onto the aisle with large glass windows
and doors covered by curtains not always drawn completely in the
couples' eagerness to get down to business. 'You wouldn't believe the
the nonchalance of some of those people!' attendants often say.
Casual as they may be about the morality of consenting adults,
they're fiercely protective of the sensibilities of the other
passengers. To Amtrak crew, sex is not a spectator sport.”

“Very late at
night, when the entire train is sleeping except for the conductors
huddled in their table far up in the dorm-coach, youngsters for whom
nocturnal groping is too tame will tiptoe down to the lower level of
their coaches and disport themselves inside the tiny bathrooms. To do
so requires an athleticism sometimes defeating to those for whom the
bloom of youth has disappeared. A favorite place of assignation
therefore is the much larger handicapped bathroom—much to the
irritation of wheelchair passengers who need to relieve themselves in
the middle of the night.”

(Rather than occupy
the accessible restroom, amorous couples could take advantage of the
larger dressing room in the lower level of the Superliner coach. It
has quite a bit more room than the little cubicle toilet
compartments, though not the floor space of the accessible
room.--SCW)

“...the
Starlight had stopped
one evening in Sacramento, and [Conductor Glen] Sullivan was
offloading passengers from a Superliner coach with a large baggage
room on the lower level, separated from the vestibule by a sliding
door with a large window. As he helped passengers down onto the
stepbox, he said, 'I hear this familiar murmur. People are saying, as
they always do when they get off, “Where's my bag, Martha?” and
“Joe, have you seen the grip?” But there's a funny gasping
in the middle of the murmuring.
I didn't think about it at first, but after we got the detraining
passengers and we're getting the new ones on, the gasping starts up
again. I realize there's something going on here, and look through
that window to the baggage room. There they are, completely nude,
just having a ball in front of everybody. They were just totally
oblivious to what's going on the other side of the door. And I said,
“Oh my God.”

'After
we hustled everybody upstairs, I went back downstairs and opened the
door, and said, “C'mon, folks. You know everyone's been watching
you!” The girl said, real enthusiastically and with a big smile,
“Yeah.” So I said,
“Are you going to be long?” She said, “All night.”I said, “Oh, Jesus.” I went
and got one of our plastic trash can liners and taped it over the
window on the inside. I don't care what people do so long as nobody
sees them. And they said, “Thank you very much.” 'Nice folks,' he
added with heavy irony.”

Kisor has several
more anecdotes about sex on the trains, and I suspect conductors,
trainmen, and on board service personnel on Amtrak and its
predecessor railroads can recall thousands more. But such stories
surely do not compare with the mystery of Nights Behind the Green
Curtains, or the romance of the Pullman honeymoon.

Kisor's book is
available as an e-book through Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, and as a used book in hardback and paperback editions.